I suspect some epidemiologists/sociologists would like to use this model to see how people might really respond to a pandemic. From the intial report, it sounds like players of CN stock were trying to "feverishly" cure dying toons, whereas others just ran around infecting who they could in order to take others down with them.

A scientist researcher was very interested in this event and wanted to talk to Blizzard about doing something like it again so she could interview folks after the fact and gauge their reactions and possibly develop ideas for what should be done if a similar event happened in real life.

In Everquest 2 they did something like this. A few Guides came on with a plague, and sneezed on a few other players, who passed it to other players, and so forth and so on till almost every toon in the game was green and feverish. It was a pain to say the least.